The Insider News

The Insider News is for breaking IT and Software development news. Post your news, your alerts and
your inside scoops. This is an IT news-only forum - all off-topic, non-news posts will be
removed. If you wish to ask a programming question please post it
here.

Get The Daily Insider direct to your mailbox every day. Subscribe
now!

If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.

As companies that are used to having workers in the same building struggle to find ways to work from home, one company that has been remote from Day One is GitLab . It recently published a handbook to help other companies who are facing the work-from-home challenge for the first time.

Don't tell me that doing sheets, macros and VBScript is a requirement to be a great developer

M.D.V.

If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.

The great majority of folks loved the new decompilation features in Visual Studio 16.5, but that did not stop me having to field a bunch of important questions about the history of decompilation, and ultimately when this kind of feature should be disabled.

If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.

When I arrived in the USA (as a Norwegian), I was surprised to meet this conception that we Norwegians was saying "Uff da!" more or less all the time, as a comment to anything that is not perfect. Of course I knew the expression, but it is very rarely heard in Norway, at least in modern times. In the Midwest of the USA, everyone of Norwegian descent or who knew any Norwegian-American, claimed that their grandmother and great grandmother always said "Uff da!" to everything. As I understand it, it was more used by females than males.

Maybe it was more common in Norwegian 150 years ago, when Scandinavians settled the Midwest. Dialect researchers often go to the USA to study old dialects that have survived in a much purer form than in Norway. The survival of "Uff da!" may be a related phenomenon.

The meaning of "Uff da" is something like "That's terrible" or "Too bad". To me, it seems as if modern Midwest use is significantly "softer", more like "Ooops!", but that is not the Norwegian use; "Uff!" indicates something that surely is bad. In Norwegian, you will often see it written as "Huff da" eller "Huff a meg" or just "Huff".

The guy's title uses the word "refactor" twice, but all the article discusses is whether to keep legacy code or throw it away. The two aren't the same thing, unless you're ... inexperienced.

Refactoring means making incremental changes to a code base in order to improve some desirable attribute: maintainability, readability, scope, etc. You start with a working piece of code, and you end with a working piece of code that's better in some meaningful way. According to the author, you have two choices: keep the code as-is, or rewrite it from scratch.

Over time, refactoring could conceivably replace an entire body of code with a significantly different one. It's like the story of the lumberjack and his axe. He's using the axe one day, and the handle breaks. He replaces the handle. Over time and repeated resharpening, the head becomes too small to be used and he replaces the head. He still thinks of it as the same axe, even though its constituent parts are completely different from when he started. In essence he refactored the axe, replacing parts as needed.